Nyantori! Hello!

It's official- I'm headed to a small town of 100 people, more or less, in the mountains above San Felix in the Comarca (reservation) Ngabe Bugle. I'll be working with the indigenous Ngabe people as the first volunteer in this particular town. It's a popular area for Peace Corps- there are 4 other volunteers within an hour's hike, and 13 out of 17 trainees in my group are headed to Ngabe sites either in the Comarca or in the nearby province Bocas del Toro. In my town itself, as far as I know, there's no water or sanitation system, but there is cell phone reception. Though my town is small, we are just 20 minutes' walk from a larger town with schools and some services. On Oct 9 we visit our sites for one week, to confirm that we really want to do this before swearing in. A member of the community will be meeting me, and we'll go together to the pueblo. I'll have more to report in two weeks when I return.

I expect it to be climatically and culturally similar to our Technical Week location (described in my previous post). So I have specific things to be excited about and specific things that I was getting tired of last week- the monotonous diet and the rain. However, in my site I need to just take it as it comes, and trust that God knows what's good for me. :) Among other things, I'm looking forward to learning the Ngobe sense of humor, at times slapstick silly.  I also know I´ll grow a lot!

Next week we have introductory classes in Ngabere. The Spanish teachers said that some English speakers find Ngabere easier to learn in some respects than Spanish (!) because the verbs are unconjugated. I'll report back on that, too.

In other news, we are also gearing up for our big "community analysis" meeting here in our host town on Oct 7. In the past 2 months we've been talking with people about health issues defined broadly: the water system, household sanitation, medical care, education, and gender roles. We've visited the components of the locally-run water system as well. We'll share what we've found at the meeting and facilitate a community discussion about these issues. This project is a warm- up for the lengthy community analysis we'll be doing in our long-term sites.